The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

How can I sufficiently tell you how moved to gratitude and appreciation I am by your good letter of July 9th, just received, and the ready understanding and sympathy expressed in which are such a blessing to me! I did proceed, after writing to you, in the sense I then explained—the impulse and the current were simply irresistible; and the business has so happily developed that I this morning received, with your letter, the kindest possible one from the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, I mean in the personal and private way, telling me that he has just decreed the issue of my certificate of Naturalisation, which will at once take effect. It will have thus been beautifully expedited, have "gone through" in five or six days from the time my papers were sent in, instead of the usual month or two. He gives me his blessing on the matter, and all is well. It will probably interest you to know that the indispensability of my step to myself has done nothing but grow since I made my application; like Martin Luther at Wittenberg "I could no other," and the relief of feeling corrected an essential falsity in my position (as determined by the War and what has happened since, also more particularly what has not happened) is greater than I can say. I have testified to my long attachment here in the only way I could—though I certainly shouldn't have done it, under the inspiration of our Cause, if the U.S.A. had done it a little more for me. Then I should have thrown myself back on that and been content with it; but as this, at the end of a year, hasn't taken place, I have had to act for myself, and I go so far as quite to think, I hope not fatuously, that I shall have set an example and shown a little something of the way. But enough—there it is!…

    Ever your affectionate old British Uncle,
    HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    July 26th, 1915.

My dear Gosse,

Your good letter makes me feel that you will be interested to know that since 4.30 this afternoon I have been able to say Civis Britannicus sum! My Certificate of Naturalisation was received by my Solicitor this a.m., and a few hours ago I took the Oath of Allegiance, in his office, before a Commissioner. The odd thing is that nothing seems to have happened and that I don't feel a bit different; so that I see not at all how associated I have become, but that I was really too associated before for any nominal change to matter. The process has only shown me what I virtually was—so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute sensation. I haven't any, I blush to confess!…

I thank you enormously for your confidential passage, which is most interesting and heartening.... And let me mention in exchange for your confidence that a friend told me this afternoon that he had been within a few days talking with –, one of the American naval attachés, whose competence he ranks high and to whom he had put some question relative to the naval sense of the condition of these islands. To which the reply had been: "You may take it from me that England is absolutely impregnable and invincible"—and – repeated over—"impregnable and invincible!" Which kind of did me good.

Let me come up and sit on your terrace some near August afternoon—I can always be rung up, you know: I like it—and believe me yours and your wife's all faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.

To John S. Sargent

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    July 30th, 1915.

My dear John,

I am delighted to hear from you that you are writing and sending to Mrs. Wharton in the good sense you mention. It will give her the greatest pleasure and count enormously for her undertaking.

Yes, I daresay many Americans will be shocked at my "step"; so many of them appear in these days to be shocked at everything that is not a reiterated blandishment and slobberation of Germany, with recalls of ancient "amity" and that sort of thing, by our Government. I waited long months, watch in hand, for the latter to show some sign of intermitting these amiabilities to such an enemy—the very smallest would have sufficed for me to throw myself back upon it. But it seemed never to come, and the misrepresentation of my attitude becoming at last to me a thing no longer to be borne, I took action myself. It would really have been so easy for the U.S. to have "kept" (if they had cared to!) yours all faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Wilfred Sheridan

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    Aug. 7th, 1915.

Dearest Wilfred,

I have a brave letter from you which is too many days old—and the reason of that is that I became some fortnight ago a British subject. You may perhaps not have been aware that I wasn't one—it showed, I believe, so little; but I had in fact to do things, of no great elaboration, to take on the character and testify to my fond passion for the cause for which you are making so very much grander still a demonstration; so that now at any rate civis Britannicus sum, and there's no mistake about it. Well, the point is that this absolutely natural and inevitable offer of my allegiance—a poor thing but my own—and the amiable acceptance of it by the powers to which I applied, have drawn down on my devoted head an avalanche of letters, the friendliest and most welcoming, beneath which I still lie gasping. They have unspeakably touched and justified me, but I brush them all aside to-night, few of them as I have in proportion been able yet to answer, in order to tell you that their effect upon me all together isn't a patch on the pride and pleasure I have in hearing from you, and that I find your ability to write to me, and your sweet care to do so, in your fantastic conditions, the most wonderful and beautiful thing that has ever happened. Dear and delightful to me is the gallant good humour of your letter, which makes me take what you tell me as if I were quite monstrously near you. One doesn't know what to say or do in presence of the general and particular Irish perversity and unspeakability (as your vivid page reflects it;) that is, rather, nobody knows, to any good effect, but yourself—it makes me so often ask if it isn't, when all's said and done and it has extorted the tribute of our grin, much more trouble than it's worth, or ever can be, and in short too, quite too, finally damning and discouraging. However, I am willing it should display its grace while you are there to give them, roundabout you, your exquisite care, and I can fall back on my sense of your rare psychologic intelligence. Your "Do write to me" goes to my heart, and your "I don't think the Russian affair as bad as it seems" goes to my head—even if it now be seeming pretty bad to us here. But there's comfort in its having apparently cost the enemy, damn his soul to hell, enormously, and still being able to do so and to keep on leaving him not at all at his ease. I believe in that vast sturdy people quand même—though heaven save us all from cheap optimism. I scarce know what to say to you about things "here," unless it be that I hold we are not really in the least such fools as we mostly seem bent on appearing to the world, and that on the day when we cease giving the most fantastic account of ourselves possible by tongue and pen, on that day there will be fairly something the matter with us and we shall be false to our remarkably queer genius. Our genius is, and ever has been, to insist urbi et orbi that we live by muddle, and by muddle only—while, all the while, our native character is never really abjuring its stoutness or its capacity for action. We have been stout from the most ancient days, and are not a bit less so than ever—only we should do better if we didn't give so much time to writing to the papers that we are impossible and inexcusable. That is, or seems to be, queerly connected with our genius for being at all—so that at times I hope I shall never see it foregone: it's the mantle over which the country truly forges its confidence and acts out its faith. But the night wanes and the small hours are literally upon me—their smallness even diminishes. I am sticking to town, as you see—I find I don't yearn to eat my heart out, so to speak, all alone in the Sussex sequestration. So I keep lending my little house at Rye to friends and finding company in the mild hum of waterside Chelsea. The hum of London is mild altogether, and the drop of the profane life absolute—for I don't call the ceaseless and ubiquitous military footfall (not football!) profane, and all this quarter of the town simply bristles with soldiers and for the most part extremely good-looking ones. I really think we must be roping them in in much greater numbers than we allow when we write to the Times—otherwise I don't know what we mean by so many. Goodnight, my dear, dear boy. I hope you have harmonious news of Clare—her father has just welcomed me in the most genial way to the national fold. I haven't lately written to her, because in the conditions I have absolutely nothing to say to her but that I feel her to be in perfection the warrior's bride—and she knows that.

    Yours and hers, dearest Wilfred, all devotedly,
    HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    August 25th, 1915.

My dear Gosse,

I have had a bad sick week, mostly in bed—with putting pen to paper quite out of my power: otherwise I should sooner have thanked you for the so generous spirit of that letter, and told you, with emotion, how much it has touched me. I am really more overcome than I can say by your having been able to indulge in such freedom of mind and grace of speculation, during these dark days, on behalf of my poor old rather truncated edition, in fact entirely frustrated one—which has the grotesque likeness for me of a sort of miniature Ozymandias of Egypt ("look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!")—round which the lone and level sands stretch further away than ever. It is indeed consenting to be waved aside a little into what was once blest literature to so much as answer the question you are so handsomely impelled to make—but my very statement about the matter can only be, alas, a melancholy, a blighted confusion. That Edition has been, from the point of view of profit either to the publishers or to myself, practically a complete failure; vaguely speaking, it doesn't sell—that is, my annual report of what it does—the whole 24 vols.—in this country amounts to about £25 from the Macmillans; and the ditto from the Scribners in the U.S. to very little more. I am past all praying for anywhere; I remain at my age (which you know,) and after my long career, utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable. And the original preparation of that collective and selective series involved really the extremity of labour—all my "earlier" things—of which the Bostonians would have been, if included, one—were so intimately and interestingly revised. The edition is from that point of view really a monument (like Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice done it—or any sort of critical attention at all paid it—and the artistic problem involved in my scheme was a deep and exquisite one, and moreover was, as I held, very effectively solved. Only it took such time—and such taste—in other words such aesthetic light. No more commercially thankless job of the literary order was (Prefaces and all—they of a thanklessness!) accordingly ever achieved. The immediate inclusion of the Bostonians was rather deprecated by the publishers (the Scribners, who were very generally and in a high degree appreciative: I make no complaint of them at all!)—and there were reasons for which I also wanted to wait: we always meant that that work should eventually come in. Revision of it loomed peculiarly formidable and time-consuming (for intrinsic reasons,) and as other things were more pressing and more promptly feasible I allowed it to stand over—with the best intentions, and also in company with a small number more of provisional omissions. But by this time it had stood over, disappointment had set in; the undertaking had begun to announce itself as a virtual failure, and we stopped short where we were—that is when a couple of dozen volumes were out. From that moment, some seven or eight years ago, nothing whatever has been added to the series—and there is little enough appearance now that there will ever. Your good impression of the Bostonians greatly moves me—the thing was no success whatever on publication in the Century (where it came out,) and the late R. W. Gilder, of that periodical, wrote me at the time that they had never published anything that appeared so little to interest their readers. I felt about it myself then that it was probably rather a remarkable feat of objectivity—but I never was very thoroughly happy about it, and seem to recall that I found the subject and the material, after I had got launched in it, under some illusion, less interesting and repaying than I had assumed it to be. All the same I should have liked to review it for the Edition—it would have come out a much truer and more curious thing (it was meant to be curious from the first;) but there can be no question of that, or of the proportionate Preface to have been written with it, at present—or probably ever within my span of life. Apropos of which matters I at this moment hear from Heinemann that four or five of my books that he has have quite (entirely) ceased to sell and that he must break up the plates. Of course he must; I have nothing to say against it; and the things in question are mostly all in the Edition. But such is "success"! I should have liked to write that Preface to the Bostonians—which will never be written now. But think of noting now that that is a thing that has perished!

I am doing my best to feel better, and hope to go out this afternoon the first for several! I am exceedingly with you all over Philip's transfer to France. We are with each other now as not yet before over everything and I am yours and your wife's more than ever,

    H. J.

To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan

Lieut. Wilfred Sheridan, Rifle Brigade, fell in action at Loos, September 25, 1915.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    October 4th, 1915.

Dearest, dearest Clare,

I have heard twice from your kindest of Fathers, and yet this goes to you (for poor baffling personal reasons) with a dreadful belatedness. The thought of coming into your presence, and into Mrs. Sheridan's, with such wretched empty and helpless hands is in itself paralysing; and yet, even as I say that, the sense of how my whole soul is full, even to its being racked and torn, of Wilfred's belovedest image and the splendour and devotion in which he is all radiantly wrapped and enshrined, [makes me] ask myself if I don't really bring you something, of a sort, in thus giving you the assurance of how absolutely I adored him! Yet who can give you anything that approaches your incomparable sense that he was yours, and you his, to the last possessed and possessing radiance of him? I can't pretend to utter to you words of "consolation"—vainest of dreams: for what is your suffering but the measure of his virtue, his charm and his beauty?—everything we so loved him for. But I see you marked with his glory too, and so intimately associated with his noble legend, with the light of it about you, and about his children, always, and the precious privilege of making him live again whenever one approaches you; convinced as I am that you will rise, in spite of the unspeakable laceration, to the greatness of all this and feel it carry you in a state of sublime privilege. I had sight and some sound of him during an hour of that last leave, just before he went off again; and what he made me then feel, and what his face seemed to say, amid that cluster of relatives in which I was the sole outsider (of which too I was extraordinarily proud,) is beyond all expression. I don't know why I presume to say such things—I mean poor things only of mine, to you, all stricken and shaken as you are—and then again I know how any touch of his noble humanity must be unspeakably dear to you, and that you'll go on getting the fragrance of them wherever he passed. I think with unutterable tenderness of those days of late last autumn when you were in the little house off the Edgware Road, and the humour and gaiety and vivid sympathy of his talk (about his then beginnings and conditions) made me hang spellbound on his lips. But what memories are these not to you, and how can one speak to you at all without stirring up the deeps? Well we are all in them with you, and with his mother—and may I speak of his father?—and with his children, and we cling to you and cherish you as never before. I live with you in thought every step of the long way, and am yours, dearest Clare, all devotedly and sharingly,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    Nov. 13th, 1915.

I take to my heart these blest Cornish words from you and thank you for them as articulately as my poor old impaired state permits. It will be an immense thing to see you when your own conditions permit of it, and in that fond vision I hang on. I have been having a regular hell of a summer and autumn (that is more particularly from the end of July:) through the effect of a bad—an aggravated—heart-crisis, during the first weeks of which I lost valuable time by attributing (under wrong advice) my condition to mistaken causes; but I am in the best hands now and apparently responding very well to very helpful treatment. But the past year has made me feel twenty years older, and, frankly, as if my knell had rung. Still, I cultivate, I at least attempt, a brazen front. I shall not let that mask drop till I have heard your thrilling story. Do intensely believe that I respond clutchingly to your every grasp of me, every touch, and would so gratefully be a re-connecting link with you here—where I don't wonder that you're bewildered. (It will be indeed, as far as I am concerned, the bewildered leading the bewildered.) I have "seen" very few people—I see as few as possible, I can't stand them, and all their promiscuous prattle, mostly; so that those who have reported of me to you must have been peculiarly vociferous. I deplore with all my heart your plague of boils and of insomnia; I haven't known the former, but the latter, alas, is my own actual portion. I think I shall know your rattle of the telephone as soon as ever I shall hear it. Heaven speed it, dearest Hugh, and keep me all fondestly yours,

    HENRY JAMES.

notes

1

Card of admission to a lecture by H. J. (The Lesson of Balzac), Bryn Mawr College, Jan. 19, 1905.